"Bonfire of the quangos" by all means – but Ofcom really was an odd one to lead on. For a start, Ofcom raises substantially more for the Treasury (£223m from the spectrum it manages) than it spends (£81m) and even then most of its funding comes from the industries it regulates, rather than the taxpayer.

What's more, as quangos go, Ofcom can claim a fairly significant record of achievement since it was formed from the merger of five pre-existing regulators following the 2003 Communications Act. Among their achievements are orchestrating so-called local loop unbundling (LLU) to facilitate competition (and significantly lower prices) in the broadband internet market, organising lower mobile call rates and sorting out the abuse of consumers by broadcasters through phoney telephone quizzes and competitions.

There is more, but the thing that really seems to have got David Cameron's goat – aside from the £400,000 salary of Ofcom's chief executive Ed Richards – is the regulator's role in formulating policy. Cameron says of Ofcom (or a new body that replaces it): "It shouldn't be making policy, it shouldn't have its own communications department... we could slim this body down a huge amount... Its remit will be restricted to narrow technical and enforcement roles... the policymaking functions it has today will be transferred back fully to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport."

As far as broadcasting is concerned, this is more or less the way things were before Ofcom came into being. But was broadcasting regulation and policy formation really better then than it is now? I don't think so. In those days the BBC – and its legendary policy apparatus – sat at the gravitational centre of broadcasting policymaking. Under John Birt, the BBC led the formulation of government policy on digitalisation, out-gunning all its competitors and even the DCMS itself with its detailed analysis. At one stage during the Davies committee hearings into the licence fee the BBC should get to pay for its multichannel, digital expansion, the committee's chairman Gavin Davies – who went on to become the corporation chairman during Greg Dyke's period as director general – had to threaten the BBC with sanctions if they didn't reduce the volume of their submissions.

The fact is that Ofcom, through its statutory commitment to market analysis, public consultation and "evidence based" policy formulation, actually brought some balance to the system. Before Ofcom, public service broadcasting (PSB) was more or less whatever the BBC said it was – which tended to reflect whatever the BBC happened to be doing at the time. Ofcom gave us a way of discussing PSB in terms of the public purposes it was supposed to meet.

And as broadcasters face ever more complex and testing times, the idea that the DCMS could simply do all the policy stuff without a huge increase in its establishment (presumably at the taxpayer's expense) and without Ofcom-style independence from day-to-day political control doesn't really bear scrutiny. So why has David Cameron picked on Ofcom?

Ofcom has recently upset the two remaining big beasts in the broadcasting jungle. The BBC because of the regulator's advocacy of "top-slicing" – taking licence fee money into a contestable fund for PSB beyond the BBC. And Sky over the way it has dealt with its inquiry into Pay TV, and specifically Sky's dominance of the market in premium sports and movies. Issues have been brewing not so much with Ofcom's role in policy formulation as with the perception that the regulator has become a player in the game it seeks to regulate. You might see that as part of its job, its statutory functions even. But there are fine lines here that some believe Ofcom has, on occasion, crossed. Now if David Cameron's been listening to the BBC's complaints, I'm a Dutchman.